


Social Consequence

by EllieMorgan



Series: Only When We're Done [2]
Category: Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-05-05
Packaged: 2018-10-23 07:02:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10714554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllieMorgan/pseuds/EllieMorgan
Summary: (Post-game.) Hints of interest turn into something more substantial, but sometimes, especially in a population as small as the Nexus, public perception can get in the way.





	1. Worry

It was awkward. It was several hundred kinds of awkward, and Kandros would swear on his own grave that Vetra Nyx was out to get him.

Vortex? A couple dozen people, tops, depending on shifts. Fewer if Dutch wasn't on the bar.

But right now, with Anan's reproductions in the early hours of the morning? Both Kesh and Drack, three APEX squads, a gaggle of his own off-duty security guards (which felt like more of a betrayal than APEX), and Vetra herself. Not only could he make a fool of himself trying to surreptitiously talk up the human Pathfinder, he could do it with a damned audience.

Ryder spared him the embarrassment and flitted around the room like it was her own party. Kandros holed up at the end of the bar and kept an eye on Drack – after all, setting something on fire today would not be a first-time occurrence for the old bastard.

So in the end, Ryder did drink what he'd gifted her, just not with him. He hadn't really considered that he'd been looking forward to a quiet flirt in a corner, but this was the familiar feel of disappointment and frankly, he had shit to do. Vetra's call of "party's over" the moment the door closed behind him only rubbed it in, and he wracked his brain trying to figure out what he'd done to piss her off.

Ryder didn't jog this morning. Tann gave Kandros a sideways glare on his way in at 05:00, and he hoped that whatever rumors the salarian had heard (if any) were greatly exaggerated. The Pathfinder came by an hour later, after some of the other crew were on-duty. Freshly showered, if her hair was really as damp as it looked.

"That was a disaster," was her opening lob.

"Less than the op," Kandros joked in return. "Something I can do for you?"

"I'm not here on business," she said.

He had to admit being the slightest bit emboldened by the presence of less staff at this time of morning than midday, but he lowered his volume all the same. "I can find a few unprofessional thoughts for you later."

Ryder shifted her weight from one leg to the other, drawing a glance at her hips from the movement alone, and she crossed her arms. It was faux confidence, and her hesitation betrayed her. "Well, that's, uh..." She cleared her throat. "Are you flirting with me, Kandros?"

Oh, he'd play. "Of course not, Pathfinder."

"Right." No change in her posture.

Well, to hell with it. Even if he got shot down hard, it was worth a try. "But," he continued, "your SAM can probably access room assignments in the residential sections. Unless your turian crewmate has a habit of breaking and entering."

Ryder started laughing. "You know she's screwing with you."

Kandros caught Watt approaching the APEX terminal in his peripheral, probably to verify statuses for the combined report. He checked his omni-tool; five minutes early for shift. Not bad.

"I know," Kandros said to Ryder at a normal volume. "I just haven't figured out why. Think that's up your alley?"

"I can look into the motive. Sorry to interrupt your work."

"Pathfinder," he said in parting.

If Kandros could have later said he'd spent the day thinking about her, he would have been much happier. Instead, his thoughts lingered on repercussions. He wasn't as blind to political machinations and social consequence as Tann sometimes seemed to think – the Initiative leadership was here to engender trust, but evolution naturally resulted in instinctual pack mentality. Family, clan, country, colony, or planet. Species. Loyalty to 'us' and suspicion of 'them'. If this went somewhere and they were outed, someone could view any concession to humans as being biased – one vote they should not have received. Tann and Addison were both sensitive to that sort of thing.

But he'd told Ryder that he'd come to Andromeda for his own adventure, and that was true. Kandros was taking his life back for his own sake. Humans didn't generally seem prone to public displays of affection, so public perception might even be a non-issue.

Kandros sighed and scratched his neck. It was all excuses either way. He was ignoring the consequences for one reason: he couldn't will himself to put a stop to it. If he chose to, it would take one message, one paragraph to explain what the fallout might be, and Ryder would understand.

But, spirits help him, he wanted to see how this would play out.

He saw her again around 19:00, twenty minutes after downing the last of Dr. T'Perro's pills with a gulp of water. The hesitant knock came first, and when he unlocked the door, Ryder looked half a bundle of nerves – she couldn't seem to figure out whether to keep her hands in her pockets or which leg to lean most strongly on. He'd have called it uncharacteristic if he hadn't seen hints of her nervousness before; she was confident as hell in her adopted career and not as certain here. Kandros wondered idly whether she'd dated less than she'd handled her gun or if she just saw a difference in risk. Sometimes romance was more dangerous than being shot at.

For the invitation having been his, he hadn't planned very well. He had a cheap bottle of wine laying around for human visitors – purchased when he realized just how many of them signed up for security work – but in hindsight he should have gone by the shop to check for something a bit higher-grade. It was too late for that now, so he pulled it out as Ryder took several steps in, and he poured as the door closed behind her. It was better than nothing.

"Privacy," he said appreciatively to break the silence.

Ryder calmed as she accepted a full glass, and some of that confidence returned to her face with a smile. "Are you sure about this?"

"Well, we've managed to be alone for two minutes. And it didn't even take a remnant ruin."

She laughed at the joke, but she shook her head and gestured from herself to him. "I mean us."

The cap of the bottle took two tries to resecure. He set it aside in favor of something turian-specific for himself, popping the lid off and pouring while he thought up some kind of answer. He didn't want to be indelicate. "We're not committing to anything,” he began. “Not yet. But it's worth a try."

"It is," Ryder agreed. There was a sigh of relief somewhere in her exhale. "To be honest, I was worried it would cause problems for you."

Kandros chuckled around his shot of turian brandy and poured a second one to keep in reserve. At least his worries during the day were able to contribute to a quick answer. "Kesh has a soft spot for you. Tann might take issue, but it's none of his damn business."

He sat down in the middle of the sofa, and Ryder slipped in at his left in exactly the way he'd gotten too used to on Havarl. He cursed internally at having discarded the idea of civvies – she was in cloth rather than armor, anyway, and it left them on uneven footing. Despite that, Kandros draped his arm over the the sofa behind her. Ryder tilted her chin up until the back of her head made contact with it, and he found himself appreciating the sudden comfort of the gesture.

She held her drink in both hands, cradling it between her thighs. Kandros found himself caught up in her silhouette again, the curve of her cheek and neck. Her clothing was thick enough to mask her torso from this angle, but his memories of seeing her stripped out of armor down to the undersuit were more than enough for him to catch traces of her shape. Ryder spun the glass of wine between her fingers. Kandros' attention went to her mouth.

"Well," was the only word he said after several minutes. It was an aborted sentence that should have gone something like 'well, we should come up with something to talk about' or 'well, I don't know about you, but I want to know what lips feel like' or 'well, you're very attractive' – but each of those ideas sounded as terrible as the last, and he was left with just the first word.

"Well," she echoed, and it was impossible to tell whether she fought a similar battle or had simply decided to try urging something more substantial out of him.

He'd go the indirect route, then. "How does the human Pathfinder end up single?"

"Carefully," was her immediate reply. No hesitation and the simplest kind of over-generalization. She sighed. "I guess I didn't feel like I had time. Dad died on day one, and I didn't want to put anyone else through that."

"Still not easy now," Kandros pointed out.

"No," she conceded. "But standing on Meridian had one hell of an impact."

He watched her openly, taking in the flit of a memory across her face and the half-second of parted lips for a deeper breath. "I'm glad it did," he said – and he didn't regret that, because she turned to look at him, hiding some expression or another under a sip of her drink. He threw his head back to empty his own glass so he could set it aside, and that gifted him a free hand; he angled his body toward her and reached out. The path he traced physically now was already familiar to his eyes – the curve of her cheek, her jaw, her neck. The gauntlet blocked sensation, but...

His omni-tool beeped.

"Shit," he muttered.

Kandros went to withdraw but found his hand restrained by hers, holding it in place at the side of her neck. Ryder took in a deep breath, moved forward, and kissed him.

It didn't feel like much. Just softness, a feather touch against the downturned angle of his mouth with a graze of her cheek against his left mandible. Humans did a puckering thing with their lips – hell, he could feel that in perfect resolution – but Kandros couldn't quite replicate it and resigned himself to the simple exhilaration of closeness, burying his hand in the hair at the back of her head in an attempt to assure her by behavior that her kiss wasn't a mistake. Somewhere in his mind, it occurred to him that he ought to know what he was looking for here. A fling? Something else? But he'd worked with enough humans – and watched enough of their relationships – that he was distantly aware that figuring it out was exactly what dating was for.

His omni-tool beeped a second time.

For as jumbled as his head was during the experience, it pained him more to end it. He groaned and broke away, pressing his face briefly into her neck because he couldn't help himself. Dragging his forearm up to activate comm was one of the most difficult trips a limb of his had ever made. A glance at Ryder told him, first, that she found this funnier than he did, and second, that she'd gotten through that without spilling a drop of her drink. She took another swig to polish it off.

"Sorry for the late call, Kandros." Savira's voice bubbled up through the comm. She was good at her job. Young, though. "We had a pretty big brawl outside Vortex, but there are more people than we can process. They're starting to get rowdy in Ops."

Not something he could brush off, then. "Be over in a minute," he said.

"Duty calls?" Ryder suggested. She'd said it to him more than once in parting.

"Yeah. Rain check?"

She stood and tidied her clothing. "Sure."

It was a miracle that Kandros could get himself off the sofa, and he took her glass and his to the kitchen sink to set them down in the basin. He'd rinse them later. A closer look at the time displayed on his omni-tool told him he'd rather be asleep than going back in to work, but there really wasn't any getting around it. "We'll try Vortex again if you can get your crew member off my back. I'm willing to bet that the best way for us to get to know each other better is plastered."

Ryder's reply was teasing. "Does it count if you can't remember it?"

"Trust me, I couldn't forget anything about you if I tried."

That was the right answer, because Ryder gave him a good view of her flat teeth in a flash of a smile. He accompanied her to the tram.

The slow-to-sober rabble that interrupted his night unfortunately drew out into the early hours of the morning. Kandros managed to drag himself away for a couple hours' rest, but he left enough time after sleeping to walk a lap around the accessible parts of the residential area in hopes of keeping himself a little more awake. He reported at 04:05, catching sight of Ryder as he walked up the ramp from the tram. She'd just passed his station, and she looked considerably more well-rested than he felt – though, admittedly, that didn't take much.

"Pathfinder," he greeted professionally.

"Tiran," she gasped out, breathless from her jog.

The sound of it triggered an involuntary fire in his bones for reasons he wished were less obvious at this time of morning, but she showed no indication of having caught on. "Ryder," was all he managed to awkwardly spit out on the subject.

She leaned forward with her hands on her knees, apparently resigned to a break at this point, and she locked her elbows with her head down. Kandros' gaze drifted from the top of her head to the curve of her shoulders, but he didn't take in as much as he wanted. A human security officer across the hall – the new one out of cryo, whose name he hadn't quite got hold of – seemed to enjoy the rear view until he met Kandros' eyes over Ryder's back and looked sheepish at having been caught staring.

"Pushing it this morning?" Kandros asked.

Ryder laughed. "Yeah," she said, and she straightened herself, wiping her brow with the back of her hand. "We asked the angara for some kett targets. It should keep my team out of your hair for a while." She reconsidered her phrasing, then motioned to his head. "You know what I mean."

"If you can spare some for APEX, they'd like the challenge."

"You're off Lexi's shit list soon, right?"

Kandros moved to take up his usual position in the office, swiping a data pad off the counter on the way. "Tann's not in a position to demote me, but if I went off to shoot things again without a good reason, he'd try."

"Vacation days?" Ryder prodded, and she found a storage crate to brace against. She was winding down early, he observed – crossing each arm over her chest to stretch, lifting each leg in turn.

His attention returned to the data pad. The report was incomplete, and Kandros resolved to stop Watt for a chat when he was on shift. "No such thing as a vacation in Helius, Ryder."

"Yet," she insisted.

Kandros looked at her over the top of the data pad, chuckled, and shook his head. "You're something else." He leaned back against the console, finally conceding that he was invested in this conversation despite his out of control to-do list, but he kept the data pad in his hand. "Shooting kett sounds like a pretty bad vacation."

"Eos is nice."

Watt wandered in early, chomping down on some kind of pastry in his left hand as he dug around behind the counter. Kandros spared him a glance and a brief acknowledgment – given that the conversation with Ryder lacked subtext at the moment, he motioned for Watt to stay put.

"Speaking from experience," Kandros continued, "Eos gets dirt in places you didn't know you had." He crossed his arms to think. "Of all your outposts, Meridian looks the best. But once they let you loose, we won't see you again for six weeks."

A crease in her brow made it obvious she was carefully considering her response, and the corners of her mouth clearly twitched when she decided on one. "I think," was very precisely intoned, "I like having a really good reason to come back to the Nexus. You're, well… I want to see where this goes." Ryder paused, then apparently let paranoia get the better of her. "I mean, if you're okay with that. Because you're great, and –"

Full volume with Watt right there. Yeah, he thought. She was definitely the type to run with it without remembering their mutual caution the day before. He should have discussed it with her, but it was too late now. Kandros' mandibles pulled away from his face, and he chuckled embarrassedly. Tann was going to tear him a new asshole if he caught wind.

"Too much?" Ryder asked, and if he didn't know better he'd think she sounded a little concerned.

"Depends how much you're hoping no one watches this security log. I can queue it up if you want to relive your embarrassment."

Blood flooded her face in yet another fascinating human mechanic. "I should let you get back to work," spilled from her mouth far too quickly.

"Drop by if you need anything, Pathfinder."

Watt had the courtesy to wait until Ryder walked off before calling Kandros out. "Smooth, boss."

"Shut it, Watt. You didn't finish this report."

Kandros had to admit he spent half his day worried he was going to be called in as the subject of a very uncomfortable meeting, but that meeting never materialized. Made sense in hindsight – if the rumor was going to make the rounds, it would take more than a few hours. And, fortunately, no one had a reason to double check his behavior by monitoring the security feed. It was reassuring to know that he wasn't expected to start up another rebellion.

That didn't mean his day improved any, though. He ended his shift prematurely for exhaustion; he hadn't had nearly enough sleep, and he could do with a hard drink and a soft bed.

So, with that in mind, there was one inevitable complication, and she'd planted herself outside his apartment, head in her omni-tool. It wasn't even a good kind of distraction.

"Nyx," he said flatly.

"Kandros," she replied.

The worrying part was when she made no move to stop him entering his apartment. He had the door open, and she continued to ignore him, concentrating too completely on whatever she was up to. Kandros stepped back out and propped himself up on the opposite side of his own doorway. "What's this about?"

"Have you read Dr. T'Perro's psych profile on our human Pathfinder?" Vetra knew damn well he wouldn't have access to that sort of medical report, but before Kandros could point it out, she kept on talking. "She's logical and professional and still finds a way to be impulsive and not think things through."

"You think stopping her from dating is a good thing?"

Vetra snorted ungracefully. "Half the team has been interested in her at some point or another. Four species of interest, if I counted right. Damn good diplomatic benefit, let me tell you." She finally dropped her omni-tool. "Look, I couldn't stop her if I tried. And I don't want to. But she's family now, and my sister thinks Ryder is humanity's divine gift to the universe. I wanted to make sure you weren't going to be an ass."

"All right." Kandros accepted the explanation only to make a good impression – Vetra had been damned annoying thus far. "What's the verdict?"

"If you do anything stupid, I'll be back. And it won't be pleasant."

Kandros scoffed, "I could arrest you for threatening security staff." And it was tempting.

"Who said it was a threat?" Vetra pushed off the wall and raised her hand at him as she started down the hallway. "Adhi glandular excretions. Think about it."

He scrunched up his nose at that thought. Well-groomed adhi smelled like unbathed varren on a good day, and the words 'glandular excretions' were never promising no matter the context. But Kandros had the sense to leave it alone, and that particular thorn in his side was out of sight before he got his door open again. He gave his place a quick scan – better safe than sorry where Vetra was concerned. He found nothing, and he swapped to civvies to sleep.

And then, laying in bed, he swore at himself for his own stupidity. He pulled up the Tempest directory and found Vetra's address without much effort.

> Tiran Kandros: You had issues with me before Ryder and I started.

It was fifteen minutes before he received the first reply.

> Vetra Nyx: You're a little slow, aren't you?

> Vetra Nyx: She's wanted in your pants for months.

Well, there just wasn't any kind of decent reply to that one. Kandros did as well as he could.

> Tiran Kandros: You knew?

> Vetra Nyx: Humans have some fascinating drinking games.

And then, a few minutes later:

> Vetra Nyx: We took on the last crate of supplies tonight.

> Vetra Nyx: It's still early.

Pain in the ass to matchmaker in one evening. Kandros couldn't keep up if he tried – and he rubbed his temples at the headache the attempt brought on. Spirits, he was tired, but was that enough of an excuse?

He might argue with himself on principle, but the top undeniable fact was that his mind would keep him too awake if he didn't take the opportunity.

> Tiran Kandros: Where's Ryder?

Vetra didn't reply, and Kandros cursed her out using every language he knew the words in and could pronounce. Of course she wouldn't make it easy. He pulled a clean undersuit and reattached his armor – if he was going to act like a hormonal adolescent and check Vortex, he was at least going to look as though he'd shown up for lack of anything better to do. His apartment door locked behind him.

The Vortex crowd looked like the usual today, still a bit early for the rush but populated enough that no one was awkwardly people-watching. Kandros made a beeline for Dutch and even managed to get a drink before being asked to pay the tab of a rowdy APEX squad, and he barely had time to lament his credit balance before her hand fell on his shoulder.

It was a relief to see Ryder there. If she'd been holed up on the Tempest, it would have been difficult to see her without things getting strange, but an unplanned meeting in the only sanctioned bar currently on the Nexus was, well… surprisingly comfortable. Kandros followed her to a corner – not objectively quiet, but relatively so.

"Can't sleep?" she asked. Intuitive woman.

"Heard a rumor you're leaving tomorrow. I'm glad I caught you."

Ryder smiled. "Kett don't wait for date night."

"Well," Kandros said, "they can wait for this one."

He was lucky enough to have been watching her face when the look of wonder bounced off it, eyes opening a fraction wider and lips parting almost imperceptibly. Kandros was either stupid enough or tired enough to ignore the crowd and take her hand in his. He could almost hear Tann yelling at him now, but the smile on Ryder's face at the relatively innocent display of affection was worth the looming nightmare.

"There's consensus on that tribute drink from APEX," Kandros remembered to tell her. There had been chatter this afternoon. "Fruity, they said. Easy going down and dangerous coming back up. Most of the turians I spoke to didn't like it, though."

She faked a look of offense, and she didn't do it very well. "Not turian-friendly?"

"There are enough turians in APEX that someone had to pass it. But I'm sure they'll revise the recipe."

"They'll have to," she said, and Ryder adjusted how her fingers locked in with his.

Yeah, Tann was going to have a conniption. Fuck it.


	2. Discretion

Tann paced restlessly by the window, expression unreadable. Kandros always had trouble with salarian facial expressions, but Tann either had the best poker face he'd ever known or was so perturbed that he'd come to some combination of features that Kandros had never seen before. Kesh stood by the ramp, checking her omni-tool impatiently – Kandros assumed she was itching for an excuse to leave. Addison stood against the shelves near Tann, arms crossed, brow furrowed, mouth down.

"I'm not angry," Tann said, "but I'm disappointed."

It took everything to resist the urge to laugh. Kandros' mandibles flicked outward involuntarily.

"There are ethical implications you seem intent on ignoring, so let me be clear: every militia operation involving the human Pathfinder, every operation involving APEX, is now tainted."

It had been a week since Ryder's departure – a week over which the rumors festered and Tann caught on. Kandros had been the subject of some good-natured ribbing from his subordinates, but nothing severe. He'd had time to plan his response: "The human Pathfinder has no privileges the others don't. All Pathfinders can dispatch APEX teams. And," Kandros added this part almost spitefully, "you like to remind us that Pathfinders report only to you."

Tann sighed, his features finally melting into something Kandros was familiar with – condescension, speaking to a young person who didn't quite get the big picture. "This is about the future. If there's some kind of incident, we can't afford the appearance of impropriety."

"You're roasting me over some hand-holding, Tann."

"Among other things." Tann stopped, clasping his hands behind his back. That single sentence gave reason to suspect he'd discovered the apartment visit as well. "Nevertheless, we've had complaints. I'm not unsympathetic to the sexual stresses of other races, Kandros, but there are lower-profile humans on the Nexus. Even turians, if you were so inclined."

The implication, of course, was that his interest in Ryder was a fetish, and Kandros clenched his jaw to prevent himself lashing out. Tann was barely tolerable on a good day – Kandros fell in line for the most part because he was interested in stability and often agreed with Tann's positions on militia and APEX usage, but being the target of some nonsensical paranoia was completely different territory.

Kesh finally looked up, having found reason to interrupt. Thank the spirits for her; she took less of Tann's crap than most. "Stop acting like we have fraternization rules."

"Perhaps it's time I created some."

The noise that came from Kesh's mouth was undignified. "He," she motioned to Kandros, "isn't stupid enough to accept that bullshit from you."

Kandros' mind fell back a step, and he chose to ignore Tann's potshots in favor of focusing on the meat – evidence. Investigatory lifeblood. So he asked, "What kind of complaints?"

The salarian actually hesitated, shifting his weight uncomfortably, and that was unusual even for him. "There are some reports of… tension, over unproductive relationships. Humans, mostly. You know how emotional they get."

If Tann had received complaints about the pair of them specifically, he'd be waving them in Kandros' face. He was full of it, clearly, and that was nothing new.

Even Addison let a sharp exhale through her teeth. "Unproductive? The Initiative didn't plan breeding pairs, Tann."

"They didn't plan for so many deaths, either."

Tann's point silenced all debate for several moments. Kandros didn't agree with his interpretation, per usual, but it was true that the Initiative had departed with nearly the minimum sustainable population.

"But," Addison continued her previous thought, "I agree that we should take care of our image. We've run a tight ship locking down any truly bad news, and Kandros has taken in several troublemakers for short periods. We need to foster hope. We can worry about ideals such as free speech and free association when we aren't in danger of losing our foothold."

He'd hoped Addison would come out on the other side of this. Seeing her agree with Tann was odd, and Kandros hoped it made her uncomfortable. He targeted the obvious: "If you start segregating people, you'll have an asari exodus."

"I'm not saying we should ban inter-species relationships," Addison defended. "I only think we should quietly discourage them by setting an example."

"It's easy for you to say that," Kandros spat without thinking. But it was true – no one in the room was affected by the potential policy change aside from himself. In his opinion, it didn't even matter. The humans had begun removing the reproduction blockers. Hell, there was already a human baby around somewhere, and that was all independent of Ryder's actions. "We'd still be having this argument if Ryder got involved with an angara."

Tann shook his head immediately. "No, a relationship with an angara would have been politically advantageous. If she could be convinced to redirect her affections to the one on her crew, for example –"

Addison was taken aback by that; she cringed visibly.

Kandros was simply pissed off. "You don't understand."

"No," Tann replied calmly. "I don't. I understand reproductive contracts, finances, and how to keep the Nexus lights running. The human Pathfinder is important to humans, do you agree?"

He was sure he was verbally walking into some kind of trap, but he didn't have another choice. "I agree."

"And your presence as head of Nexus security reassures the turian population that they have a say in general affairs?"

"Yes," Kandros said. It was probably true to some extent.

"Then please do not give the impression that you will be compromised by your proximity to human matters."

It took a moment for Kandros to realize that this was Tann's attempt at compromise. He'd called the meeting insisting the relationship should be cut off, but that was no longer the case. Instead, he was asking for reassurance. Kandros had no problem with recusing himself where necessary.

"We'll be discreet," was Kandros' verbal concession. 'For now' went unsaid, but the pause before Tann nodded could have been interpreted as a mutual understanding.

Kesh grunted, probably annoyed at having had to meet at all, and left the room before any more was said.

"This isn't a good idea," Addison said, "but I'm willing to take responsibility for any complaints that cross my desk if you keep me apprised."

Kandros tightened his mandibles to the sides of his face at the suggestion.

"I don't need details," she revised. "But if this continues, we'll need to frame it properly."

"My love life isn't political," Kandros countered.

Addison frowned and looked away, readjusting her gaze to somewhere in the middle of Tann's floor. "Everything a leader does is political, and you should learn that very quickly. You're meant to represent every member of the Initiative, but the moment someone disagrees strongly with something you've done, they won't believe you represent their interests anymore. They lose faith." She met his eyes again, looking just as stern as when she'd started. "That doesn't mean you should change."

Tann stiffened when she said that, and Kandros resisted the temptation to spread his mandibles in a grin.

She continued, "But it does mean you should be careful. Desperate, stressed people do desperate things."

Kandros nodded, unable to prevent a measure of happiness from creeping into his tone, though he wasn't sure it translated. "I'll keep that in mind." Addison showed no hint of intent to leave, so he went to walk out instead, mind beginning to drift back to recon check-ins and APEX operations.

"Kandros."

Tann's voice brought him to a halt. He turned back, and the salarian was settling in behind his desk.

"Be sure," the director said simply.

Kandros left without another word.

It was easy enough to find a mission he could use to justify his direct involvement. Point of fact: the militia was still small. There weren't all that many people between himself and the rest of the force, hierarchically, and the sheer number of ex-mercs and conflicting military doctrines meant that training on how to work as one unit was an absolute necessity.

It wasn't Ryder's kett – instead, a small group of exiles were trying to start up some kind of pirate operation and were stupid enough to hit colony supplies – but it was more than enough excuse for formation basics in a live-fire scenario. Kandros needed to shoot something that wasn't Jarun Tann, and he was willing to admit that making a bunch of militiamen of varying skill look up to him made him feel a hell of a lot better about breaking his leg during the last excursion.

In the end, it was still several days between his return to the Nexus and Ryder's. Letting him know she'd returned was simple: she jogged around Ops at 04:00 and he was awake to see it.

He was rattled by Tann's meeting despite himself. He'd tried to ignore it, but seeing her smile brought the lecture back fresh, and it was strange to be temporarily sobered from Ryder's unique charms. She received a message that drew her away before she could stop to talk, and Kandros found himself breathing a sigh of relief – he wanted and needed to speak with her, but Ops was not the place to do it. He dug out her contact information from the directory and made his suggestion by message instead.

> Tiran Kandros: 18:30?

She didn't reply.

But she did show up around 18:40, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and carrying a gift of mutually-accessible booze. Kandros laughed a little as she held it up, trying valiantly to not come across as at all disquieted. "Thanks," he said. "I forgot to replace the last one." He'd kept the armor off this time, remembering his prior regrets.

"We'll drink it tonight. Maybe watch a vid?"

"We need to talk," he said, and that clearly didn't translate to his intentions because something akin to pain flashed across her features – a tightening of her lips and upturn of brow that only lasted for a fraction of a second – before she put 'Pathfinder' back in place. Kandros pressed his hand to the side of her face in an attempt to physically clarify, but the expression that induced was confusion. He didn't understand how such a straightforward sentence might have that impact until he considered how the translation must have come out – 'we need to talk', in her tongue – and he realized he was familiar with the phrasing. "Sorry," he said. "We need to talk about my position as head of Nexus security," was a much safer sentence. "Tann had me up for a chat a couple weeks ago. About us."

Ryder touched his hand with hers, lips curving upward in what he hoped was honest relief. She took a deep breath before expressing a clear explanation of her reaction: "I was worried you changed your mind about this," she admitted. "Did Tann take it that badly?"

Kandros ran his thumb across her cheek before withdrawing. The bottle she brought was corked, but he knew he'd seen a corkscrew in a drawer somewhere as a standard utensil – it was funny to think what the Initiative expected everyone to do by issuing them all an item meant to open human-sourced wine bottles. "He took it badly to start," he said, walking off to dig through a drawer or three. Ryder sat off-center on his sofa and pulled up her omni-tool. Kandros continued, "and he still thinks the two of us are a disaster. I told him we'd be discreet for a while."

Ryder looked up just as he found the corkscrew, and he popped open the bottle of wine while she watched. "For a while?" she asked.

He poured two glasses full and left the bottle on the counter. "Until we feel this out."

She reached for and accepted her glass when he brought it close, and Kandros joined her on the sofa. Ryder shifted herself sideways, twisting her legs one over the other in a way he was definitely incapable of, until she sat reverse with most of her weight on his left leg and her knees against his hip. Uncomfortable as it looked, it gave her enough space to lean forward for a kiss (or several), and he wasn't about to object to her affection.

"Picking up where we left off?" Kandros wondered between the unhurried presses of her lips. He wouldn't ever admit nervousness with her, but the fact remained that he was poking fun at the obvious – and her revenge was drawing her palm upward over his hip and waist, fingers pressing hard in every place necessary to rile him up. His mouth opened of its own accord at the sensation, instinct insisting that air he breathed from beneath his mandibles was nowhere near sufficient at the moment, and it opened an opportunity for Ryder to press her tongue through the gap for the tiniest lick of his own.

Kandros dropped his drink.

Ryder jumped up involuntarily when the liquid hit her back, splashing her own previously-secure glass of wine over the rim and onto Kandros' shoulder – spirits, he shouldn't have even poured the damned things – and he grabbed her by her hips just from the shock of it. He hadn't heard the glass break, just a thunk as it landed and rolled off somewhere, but he worried one of them would step on it without looking. He swore – he could feel her pelvic bone through her clothes, beneath his thumbs, and that was absolutely not supposed to be his first priority right now – and then Ryder began to laugh.

"I hope that means you aren't upset," he said, sliding out from beneath her to help her up and evaluate the damage. The floor and fabric of the sofa would clean well; Ryder's clothing (and his own) weren't as lucky. He found the lost glass quickly as it hadn't gone far, and he plucked it up while he remembered to.

"Furious," she replied, but the smile on her lips told him she wasn't serious about it. She looked at him in a way he had trouble interpreting – gently, maybe, or...

The dampness at his shoulder pulled him out of his thoughts. Ryder drank what remained in her glass and helped him clean, despite having taken the brunt of it. Her hoodie was removed and dropped unceremoniously in the kitchen sink; spots of wine had colored her undershirt as well, but Kandros hesitated to tell her for fear she'd remove it. He changed in the bathroom for politeness' sake, then gathered up his and hers to toss in the laundry.

"So," she said quietly as they settled in on the edge of his bed, "that surprised you."

"My romantic experience is," he trailed off for a moment, "uh, turian." He'd seen just about everything there was to see in human courtship due to a plethora of humans drinking an excess of alcohol, but it had taken him a few minutes to remember tongues – there was a phrase, 'swap saliva', and he'd only understood it the first time he saw one person's tongue in the other's mouth.

Ryder didn't dwell on it. She stretched her arms out instead, fingers locked and arms extended front. "There's a new film in rotation now," she said without looking him in the eye, and Kandros' immediate working theory was that she wasn't sure whether to retry what she'd attempted. "Someone on Eos wrote it and rendered it with fake actors–"

He stopped her by pressing his mouth to her lips. Ryder let out some kind of muffled gasp – he could feel the spread of her lips and her breath – and her reciprocation clung to his mouth for an extra moment when he pulled back. "We'll watch it later," he promised with his forehead against hers.

"Sure," was an awed whisper that he felt in a puff of air before she dove back in. He opened his mouth for her intentionally this time, discovering very quickly that his tongue was awfully short in comparison to hers. Ryder didn't seem to mind his limited ability to return this particular kind of affection – he still found it weird after several minutes of engaging her, but something about Ryder's enthusiasm was downright mesmerizing.

Kandros left his right hand, tentatively, at the curve of her waist. It took conscious effort to go no further. Ryder didn't have mandibles or edges or spurs. Her hips weren't very pronounced. What she did have differed greatly from what he was biologically keyed to find attractive, but – and Kandros considered this important – she had acted as far more than the human Pathfinder. Simply, he'd been seduced by her capacity to care for everyone equally. He was reminded of Nexus history, divided in two parts: before and after Ryder, in two distinct phases. Kandros was attracted to her, and he had been for longer than he cared to admit, but he wasn't going to rush to drown a burgeoning affection with lust. He could recognize now that he wasn't interested in friends-with-benefits.

Ryder paused when the laundry chimed, pulling away to let the lingering evidence of her presence dry out on his tongue. She was winded and the tiniest bit flushed, so he'd done something right by human courtship definitions. That was extraordinarily satisfying on several levels. Kandros pressed his temple to hers for a heartbeat, then extricated himself from her, reluctantly, to tend their clothes.

"Hydroponics?" she asked while he tugged her now-dry hoodie from the machine. Kandros offered a non-committal hum, and she clarified, "A second date. If you can't leave the Nexus without justifying, it's that or Vortex."

"I don't know whether that qualifies as 'discreet'," he said. He handed her the sweatshirt, and she began to tug it back into place over her speckle-stained tee – he stopped her. "You'll get wine on it again."

Ryder stopped to look down at herself and, seeing nothing on the front, twisted her shirt in an attempt to glance behind. The action offered extra definition to the lines of her breasts and waist, which he managed to admire without swearing. "We can play it off as friends," she said. She finally caught sight of the stain and stood, plodding her way toward the bathroom – he assumed to swap it out. Kandros discovered that her trousers had survived when he caught himself watching her hips as she retreated.

He took a breath, held it for several seconds, and exhaled. He was in trouble. Certain parts of him – spirits, his physical reaction to her was dangerously close to obvious, and he adamantly didn't want to go that route tonight. Mentally combining thoughts of Vetra's threat of adhi glandular excretions and thoughts of Tann were enough to minimally clamp down on the feeling.

Ryder returned, yawning, with her hooded sweatshirt in place and her undershirt crumpled in one hand. Kandros checked his omni-tool to find it was later than he'd assumed. "I can take a meal in hydroponics around midday," he said, "and meet you here after shift."

Her agreement was accompanied by a chaste kiss to the side of his mouth, and she supplemented with her free hand softly against his upper arm and the brush of her cheek against his mandible.

When she left, sticking Kandros with an uncomfortable combination of arousal and exhaustion, it occurred to him that he might already be falling in love. The quickness of that conclusion was terrifying.


	3. Trouble

When he caught sight of her, he was less nervous. Ryder hadn't noticed him yet, so he leaned back against the railing, watching her idly as he tugged open his ration. Some spiced meat flavor, supposedly, but it didn't taste right. She looked relaxed – her feet shoulder-width apart, hips tilted, and her thumbs hooked through her belt. She was staring down a wall of greenery that would ripen to food in several weeks, and it reminded him of a rumor that a few scientists were beginning to grow meats. Kandros hoped there might be some chefs slated to come out of cryo. Home cooks might balk at losing first dibs, but Kandros couldn't make a decent meal for the life of him, and his current answer to 'what do you miss most about home' was 'real food'.

Next thing he knew, Ryder was joining him against the railing at a polite distance, and she greeted him warmly without using his first name. If Tann's request hadn't already seemed childish, it certainly did now – it was ridiculous that he shouldn't touch her. He visually traced her cheek and jaw where his hands couldn't, affectionately enough that he was sure he'd given himself away to even the most casual observer. Based on how the muscles in her face relaxed, he'd given himself away to her, too.

"Every time I get into a fight with outlaws, I feel like we're losing something," she said, and Kandros was grateful she'd come up with anything at all to talk about in this situation. "I should miss home when I look at this. I kind of expected to."

"But instead you think, 'have I shot a botanist'?"

Ryder focused on his eyes for a moment as though looking for something, then turned her attention back toward the plants and let a puff of air escape her lips. "I guess you've thought about it, too," she concluded.

"You weren't a soldier."

"I was," she admitted, and it surprised him. It shouldn't have – she could handle herself damn well and skills like that usually went undeveloped in civilian life – but with humans it was so difficult to tell. "I didn't do anything that made me feel like a soldier. The Alliance made sure I knew how to aim, but Dad made sure I knew how to do it right."

Kandros finished off his ration, swallowing and crumpling the wrapper in his palm for now. "You mentioned he was an N7."

Ryder crossed one foot behind the other and extended her elbows behind her onto the railing, the bulk of her weight coming to rest there. "Yeah. He was really good at his job. I feel a little guilty."

"Why?"

"I wouldn't have learned this much if he hadn't died."

He wanted to reach out to her, but the number of people in close proximity kept him in line. Instead, Kandros was forced to watch the untended hurt in her body language: the tenseness of her shoulders and how her breathing had gone shallow. He muttered an apology, not specifying that it was for his inaction, but she lifted her eyes to meet his and smiled at him all the same.

His omni-tool beeped, barely audible over the ambient chatter in this part of the Nexus, but he caught the sound and raised his arm. It was a message from Nels, simply 'There's a problem with Recon 202.' Kandros gave it a few seconds, but Nels didn't send any additional information. That worried him some; that sergeant usually communicated in exhaustive detail.

It must have shown in his body language, because Ryder said, "I'll let you get back to work."

He nodded, unable to do much else, and left her with an ordinary "Duty calls, Pathfinder." Kandros checked his omni-tool again while on the tram toward Ops on the off chance he'd missed a notification, but he found no new messages. His fears half-solidified when he was pulled into an impromptu huddle with the salarian Sgt. Nels and a turian too new for him to recall her name. Kandros would kill for security to have a meeting room at a time like this, but they were all being used for storage as construction carried on.

"Recon 202 hasn't reported in," Nels said hurriedly.

And the turian added, "It's a stone's throw from Eos."

That was the last thing Kandros wanted to hear. "Damn. Any others in the area?"

Nels recited the information from memory – he'd known what Kandros would need and had gotten ahead of it. "Team 220 is resupplying at Prodromos," he said, "and 204 is reporting no change in conditions within range of Eos orbit."

"Does 204 have last known coordinates on 202?"

"Yes."

Kandros' judgment call was quick, and he spoke more confidently than he felt. "Tell them to close in, follow where orbit would have taken them if they're disabled. If they see any hint of movement during approach, they need to leave immediately and report. Get 220 in the air as soon as possible."

"I'll send it now." Nels went immediately to a console.

He didn't forget the turian. "What's your name?"

"Valhix, sir." She seemed young, still carrying herself as though she hadn't completed her service back home. Andromeda truly did bring all sorts.

"Look at ship hardware. I want to know what has the second-best scanner of all small vessels docked here."

She blinked at him but proved very quickly that she wasn't afraid to ask questions. "Second-best, sir?"

"The Tempest will be at the top of that list."

Valhix still looked uncertain, but in true turian form she nodded anyway and went to complete the task she'd been assigned. Nels gave Kandros a quick, human-style thumbs-up from across the room, and Kandros pulled up a map of the system on his omni-tool.

He'd filtered through every reason this might be an overreaction and had disregarded most: the scourge wasn't dense enough in this system to interfere with Recon 202, the communications systems on all small recon craft had been inspected over the past month, and any other system failures would have been reported. The chance they weren't dead was slim, and Kandros found himself hoping for a catastrophic engine failure rather than–

Nels was suddenly back at his side, speaking hushedly. "204 is en route, but 220 is reporting four ships coming up on a trajectory to enter Eos' atmosphere. One is a kett freighter."

"Tell 220 to monitor where they land and get an identity on the other three if possible. Warn Prodromos and copy Addison."

Valhix was back the moment Nels hurried off. "We have nothing with a stronger scanner than our scouts. The Nexus science vessels are all off-station."

That was that, then. If Recon 204 couldn't locate 202, then the alternatives were using the Tempest or waiting for a science vessel to become available.

Kandros ran through the possible scenarios in his mind. One kett ship didn't guarantee they were responsible; their technology had been hijacked before. The other three ships would shed more light. They would either truly be kett, which carried a higher chance of an assault on Prodromos, or they would be outlaws, which might buy time or allow for some negotiation. Talkative outlaws were the best case scenario.

It was a stressful thirty minutes before Recon Team 220 was able to confirm that the three accompanying shuttles were both their tech and reported missing from the Nexus while taking inventory after the uprising. Prodromos was on alert, but the landing site was several hours away from the outpost by foot – too close for comfort, but too far to indicate they wanted a quick strike.

His optimism for talkative outlaws was much stronger than it had been. Still, APEX wasn't equipped for that possibility, and the scientists at Prodromos weren't equipped to handle a hostile response.

Ryder.

Kandros swore and stormed out of the militia office toward Tann's. He knew, logically, that even before his involvement with Ryder, he still would have asked her this favor. She still would have agreed to help. But Tann had put that bug in his ear about how things looked, and his usual comfort in command had been usurped by doubt. He entered Tann's section and could hear Kesh angrily confronting the director about resource allocations for the life support systems – none of the other Pathfinders were here, and Kandros wasn't about to interrupt Kesh's stress relief. He pulled up his omni-tool to check transit records, and none of the others were even on the Nexus right now.

He'd have to ask Addison to make the request, and he groaned at the realization before turning on his heel and taking a left toward the stairs.

Addison wasn't there either. Of course not. Kandros faced the window and pulled up his omni-tool.

> Tiran Kandros: I need to talk to you.

Addison's reply was immediate, and Kandros breathed a sigh of relief.

> Foster Addison: Can it wait?

> Tiran Kandros: Ryder is the only Pathfinder available. I need her to solve that problem on Eos.

A pause of several minutes.

> Foster Addison: Can't you dispatch a strike team?

> Tiran Kandros: They're exiles, not kett. We can't confirm they're hostile.

Another.

> Foster Addison: I see. Yes, Ryder should investigate.

Kandros typed and deleted various responses. Things like 'do you even remember that meeting' and 'that looks like a sentence that will let you claim it isn't your fault if I don't clear things through Tann' – but frankly, he didn't have time. He opened a new conversation.

> Tiran Kandros: Ryder, there's a situation on Eos that needs your attention.

> Pathfinder Ryder: Got it. Send the basics to SAM.

Her response was a breath of fresh air – action amongst politics. He nearly laughed when he saw how the system displayed her name, though. It was as though she didn't deserve one anymore and was just a part of 'Pathfinder' in the same way Drack and Kesh were part of Nakmor. He could to kick up a fuss about that with systems – ah, damn. Tann's rule. 'Pathfinder Ryder' it was, then.

Kandros' mood was lighter. He made his way back down to the militia office and had Nels forward the relevant data; it would take Ryder some hours to arrive if she left now, but Prodromos had moderate defenses in case the outlaws got bold.

His evening was going to be a lot lonelier than he'd hoped, though. He typed out a message for her, but he found himself hesitating to send it for fear of appearing too forward. Ultimately, the threat of her leaving the Nexus and having his message forwarded to an e-mail terminal was what pushed him to make his decision.

> Tiran Kandros: Sorry about tonight. I wanted to see you, maybe find happier things to talk about.

> Pathfinder Ryder: Talking about dead people for fifteen minutes wasn't a good second date?

Kandros couldn't help but chuckle.

> Tiran Kandros: We'll try again.

> Pathfinder Ryder: I want to have a word with Tann when I get back.

"You look like a man in love."

He looked up abruptly. Valhix was standing directly in front of him, and he'd been too absorbed to notice.

"Sir," she added politely.

Kandros dropped his arm. He'd fallen to fully unprofessional for that moment, and it wasn't the impression he wanted to give. He considered telling the new recruit that things were a little more casual than 'sir' here, but anyone just out of cryo didn't need the extra stress of moderating their speech patterns – Kandros remembered that feeling. He was reminded of it any morning he woke a little too sluggish for his own good.

"Answering a personal message," he deflected. "Do you have something to report?"

Valhix nodded. "Recon Team 204 has swept the area twice and hasn't found any debris from 202."

Kandros considered the possibility that the disappearance of Recon 202 might be unrelated to the outlaw ships landing on Eos. Even if that were the case, he was confident that letting Ryder respond to these exiles was the right call – but it would complicate matters. He reopened his omni-tool and sent Ryder a message – if it was too late, she'd see the e-mail – with an additional request to scan for debris. Barring results there, the options were capture or defection. He thanked Valhix before jotting his thoughts down on a datapad. Once recorded, he moved on with his day, considering a reorganization to put his people into more distinctive scopes.

His apartment was too quiet that evening only because he'd been looking forward to her visit. He wanted – well, he didn't know what he wanted. Her, physically, right up to where sense took over to second-guess everything. The soldier in him wanted to fight again, seeking some sort of morbid evidence that she'd have his back if anything went south, but the romantic (spirits, he even had that side of himself) wanted to throw caution to the wind and have her warm his bed.

There was no news of Ryder for several days. When she did return, she looked as though she'd just walked onto the Tempest and collapsed for the entire trip back – she was still in armor, bloodied and dirty, with a dent in her shoulder guard that looked suspiciously like it had been caused by a bullet. She held her helmet in her hand and was focused on trudging toward Tann's office, but she stopped when she looked up and caught Kandros staring. Ryder gave him an open smile, just a brief flash of her teeth.

That was the moment he stopped questioning whether he was in love with her.


	4. Travel

Ryder's talk with Tann was barely several minutes. Kandros was in his usual place beside the APEX terminal, and Ryder stood in front of him with her helmet on her hip. She didn't offer up how the discussion went, so he didn't press for details. He was the third person briefed on the fate of his own recon team, after Addison – by vidcon from the Tempest several hours ago – and Tann.

She'd found nearly two dozen exiles working to disassemble what remained of the kett freighter, and they had been immediately aggressive despite shouted attempts at a cease-fire. Half were recent defectors, thawed long after the uprising. Only three surrendered to Ryder unarmed at the end of the exchange, and none of them would speak except to insist they be deported to Kadara. They were kept temporarily in makeshift cells at Prodromos. Ryder hoped for solid evidence of wrongdoing in the coming days; it wouldn't be right to hold them otherwise, and Kandros agreed. More than once, he'd considered putting together a proposal for punishment and jurisdiction outside the Nexus – a more robust law enforcement framework should be a higher priority now, with colonies to consider – and Ryder agreed with the idea.

Buried in one of the exiles' ships, Ryder found mention of a tow and a navpoint much closer to the Nexus. She suspected Recon Team 202 solely on the basis of having found no anomalies while scanning the system – no debris. They hadn't been destroyed. Kandros found himself breathing a sigh of relief. Ryder hadn't eliminated the possibility of defection, but, where it came to life and death, he'd take any shred of hope he could get.

It didn't take much thought to know what he wanted to do. These were his people, and he wasn't some scientist content to sit on his ass and send Ryder to fight his battles. At the same time, he didn't want to assign APEX alone for a potential hostage situation – Ryder's team was probably the most qualified by far, excepting some specialists still in cryo. All that in mind, he made his request in a purely professional capacity, Tann be damned: "When I lose a team out there, I don't hope to get them back. But if there's a chance they're still alive, I want to be involved." He paused to gauge her reaction, but he couldn't see any change in her features or posture. "And the firepower wouldn't hurt."

"I know," she replied. "I told Tann I wanted APEX support. He wouldn't talk about…" Ryder faltered over phrasing and took her eyes off him for a moment before she continued, "well, that. But he won't stop you from helping get your team back."

He could have kissed her. Would have, if not for social norms – Tann's ideas on appropriateness aside. "I don't know what you had to give him for that, but I appreciate it."

A laugh escaped Ryder before she caught it, and she met his eyes again. She hid the grin that was clearly tempting her mouth – it was a little stiffer at the sides, and the slight rise of her cheeks toward her eyes was a simple tell. It was a heartbeat before he realized: bargaining on the APEX front was a steal, and what the Tempest truly had potential for was several uninterrupted hours of peace. Kandros caved to temptation in a small way, clapping his hand to her shoulder platonically and managing to thank her – and that was extraordinarily difficult given the rising, desperate want to embrace her.

Some part of Ryder's professionalism broke as well, far more than his. Her hand was halfway raised toward his face before she stopped herself. "Tiran," she said instead, quietly.

He was painfully aware of every single individual standing in the militia office right now, and even more aware of the people walking by outside, oblivious to the turmoil he could see and feel clear as day. "I'll gather a team and meet you in the docking bay."

Ryder didn't stop the second time, her hand completing the trip to touch him, and Kandros couldn't help his reaction. He closed his eyes and relaxed into the feel of soft skin at her palm, her thumb tracing a crescent into his mandible. It took several seconds for sense to override desire; he opened his eyes and tried to look at her sternly, mandibles tight against his face. Ryder dropped her hand abruptly and offered agreement to whatever it was he'd said a minute ago – the hell had he said a minute ago? – and then she was gone.

One of his lieutenants, Sajax, was standing off to his right, openly staring but with nothing to say on the matter. Nels was definitely very engrossed in a blank datapad, and Watt was fascinated by the inventory labels on nearby supply crates. Kandros pressed his thumb to the middle of his forehead in an attempt to ward off the mortification.

"Sajax, I'm leaving you in charge," he said.

Her confirmation was a neutral, "Got it."

"Nels," he said. There was no immediate reply, so he repeated himself. "Nels."

The salarian looked up, finally. "Yes?"

Kandros' decision on who to bring was blissfully simple. "I'm borrowing Leneria, Patel, and Hactis."

"Which Hactis?" Nels asked.

"The older one. Tell them to get their gear and board the Tempest. Get in touch with me if Leneria isn't sober." He qualified it, but even if Leneria were drunk – that asari had a problem – she had the exact set of infiltration skills he wanted available for this op and several hours to sober in transit. Hactis was an old turian bastard with a family he refused to speak of – his son was very open by contrast – but whenever Kandros asked about his grenades, the elder Hactis went off on some angry diatribe about a throwing sport he used to play before boot camp. Patel, a human, was simply a strong generalist susceptible to boredom.

Nels dropped his datapad excuse and went immediately to work, fingers flying over the terminal interface. Kandros would never fault that sergeant for his enthusiasm.

After handing over today's work to Sajax, he went to get his own gear in order. Kandros felt less confident with his weapons attached to his back, which was a first, but he suspected it had more to do with this op than the weapons themselves. He pulled up his omni-tool to drop a message for Tann about Sajax covering the militia office for the time being. It felt too normal, like a subordinate coordinating with his superior, but if that type of brownnosing was necessary to get on Tann's good side, then Kandros would suck it up and hit 'send'. Unfortunately, Kandros also had to admit it was probably better for the Nexus if Tann wasn't blindsided by security's administrative decisions. Tann sent back a generic acknowledgment as Kandros entered the tram.

Upon boarding the Tempest, Kandros was greeted by Liam Kosta's outstretched hand. "Good to have you aboard," was the peppy greeting.

"It's been a while," he replied, accepting for a human handshake.

"Pathfinder says you can set up in the meeting room. That's through there," he pointed at the door beside, "through the next arch, up the ramp. You got others coming?"

Kandros glanced toward the bridge. Both the pilot and science officer were present, the science officer seated sideways to face her compatriot, and they seemed to be having a pleasant discussion based on their respective tones of voice. "Three," he told Liam. "Where's Ryder?"

"Downstairs," Liam replied without so much as blinking. The lack of knowing smile or suspicion or sideways look was refreshing. "Eating something, I think. Or in her quarters." For a moment, Kandros worried he'd be told to wait in the meeting room – and he'd have to defer to the Pathfinder's team in that case – but it never came. Liam simply smiled wide. "I'll be around."

"Thanks."

Ryder wasn't in the kitchen. He tapped his knuckles twice on the door of her quarters – when it slid open to reveal her standing there in only a tank and trousers, clean and damp from a shower, every urge he'd clamped down on in the past hour bubbled to the surface. Kandros had her here with nothing to stop him; he touched their mouths together to acknowledge her style of affection before nuzzling into her temple to satisfy his own. He didn't linger there, sliding down until his mandible met her cheek and his mouth was close enough to her ear to mumble something affectionate about missing her, whatever his mind came up with on auto-pilot. Then he moved, finally, to bury his face where her neck met her collarbone and breathed her in. "Ryder," he did remember saying – and only because the movement of his mouth on her skin made her shiver. He brought his hands to rest on her upper arms – reverently, knowing that if he moved them anywhere else, he'd end up with a lot of explaining to do.

She exhaled for the first time since he'd taken hold of her. He felt pressure at his back, her hands pulling him as close as his armor would allow. "Tann's making this worse," she muttered.

"Yeah," was Kandros' reply through a laugh. "Yeah, he is." He straightened back up in the interest of getting a good look at the expression on her face.

It was gentle. She moved her hands to each side of his face, said, "When we're back, I'll fix it," and kissed his mouth.

At the moment, he was willing to believe she could fix anything.

The speakers for the ship-wide comms burst to life somewhere above them. "Hey Ryder," came Vetra's voice, "if you've still got your pants on, we're ready to head out."

Kandros inferred that his people must be aboard, and the half of him happy to stay here cursed the other half for capitulating to the need to brief his team. Ryder had barely stepped back before she was keyed into the comm, but he jumped in to speak first. "I'm going to ignore that," came out more solidly than he expected, and Vetra didn't have a quip for him in reply. "Is my team in the meeting room?"

"Waiting on you." That voice was Patel.

"I'll be up in five," he said.

Ryder closed the channel, then looked up at him. Her eyes moved slightly across his face, and it took Kandros a moment to realize she was tracing his markings. She didn't seem to quite know what to say, and the mood had changed perceptibly. For his part, Kandros was more relaxed after having finally indulged himself.

So he asked, "How are you holding up?"

Ryder seemed surprised by the question, but he supposed that, if she'd spoken first, he would have reacted similarly. "I didn't really stop to think about it."

There was a bruise on her shoulder that he'd ignored until now, sitting where her damaged shoulder guard had been. It was round and dark. Kandros touched her again to run his thumb over it, as feather-light as he could manage without much tactile feedback through his glove.

"You never seem afraid of anything," Ryder said.

"I put on a good face."

He wasn't sure what he'd done to deserve it, but she smiled and pressed her lips to his left mandible before pulling away. Ryder headed for the desk to grab one of her thinner, form-fitting tops off its surface. She tugged her trousers low on her hips as he looked on – his sense of modesty, already generally more strict than the human average, should have dictated that he find something interesting to look at somewhere on the other side of the room. What won out was the fact that this was Ryder, and he was completely helpless against her lack of giving a damn.

It didn't last long in the end; she'd done it to smooth her tank below the waist of her trousers, and they were pulled back in place immediately before she added her shirt to the ensemble. Kandros stopped himself from imagining its removal by his own fingers – having gone from one engagement immediately to the next, Ryder would be better off resting even if she were to welcome his advances.

Kandros made his way upstairs in time to meet his five minute estimate. Leneria and Hactis were standing professionally; Patel reclined in the middle of the floor, and Kandros stepped over him carefully. The brief was simple – they didn't know what they were going to find, but he expected a heavy reliance on Leneria's stealth grid, and Hactis needed to prepare for the possibility that he might have to plant explosives without being able to see his own hands. Patel didn't really need briefing – he was Patel, and he would adapt.

Afterwards, Ryder invited Kandros up to the weapons locker, just in case any mods she retrieved from exiles over the past several months were better than the ones Sloane's people had been kind enough to not steal from the Nexus. His were on par, which was a pleasant surprise, but Ryder's interests proved a little wider than weaponry; she walked him backward until she'd put him between herself and the wall, and then she did something he could barely describe. It crippled him, whatever it was.

Ryder pulled him down, kissed his mouth, and then went to work with lips and tongue and teeth where his throat met the neck of his undersuit, just right of center. She sucked there, drawing his skin up enough to touch her tongue, and when she chose to drag her teeth across the captured flesh – spirits, it was gentle enough to be absolutely maddening. Then she slid up and further right just below his jaw, and that did things to his sense of touch that should be illegal in two galaxies – Kandros pressed his right hand to the back of her head in some kind of subconscious drive to keep her there. He could smell whatever she used to clean her hair, strong and sweet – hell if he knew what it smelled like to her, but the thought didn't stick around long; he'd soon have a lot of trouble standing, or preventing himself from screwing her into – well, anything. Everything. Somewhere in there, when he realized it, he finally managed to drop his hand and get his mouth around the word 'stop'.

Ryder did stop – immediately, thank fuck – leaving his neck slick and his groin uncomfortable.

"Please," was his second word, somewhat delayed by his continuing effort to get a half-decent breath. "Shit," was his third.

She evaluated him for a moment, and he imagined she was observing the arousal that had to be obvious on his face – and when she found it, she took in a sharp, quiet breath and suddenly looked surprised. Must not have affected that turian ex-boyfriend this well, he thought, and he chuckled aloud.

"That," he said lowly once he felt he could form a coherent sentence, "was dangerously close to the point of no return."

It was a moment before she replied, "Is that a bad thing?"

Well, he thought, at least that let him know sex was on the table. Not literally on the – and now he was thinking about it. Kandros groaned. "I want to be respectable. Timing's not great, either." Moreover, the chance of being caught in here wasn't exactly a turn-on.

Ryder didn't seem put off, only thoughtful. She backed away exactly three steps, smiled, and said, "After."

Please, yes. "After," he agreed.

It was several minutes before he managed to calm down, and at that point he swapped out one of the mods on his assault rifle just to feel as though he'd done something at the weapons locker other than be thoroughly compromised by the human Pathfinder. He might have been seeing things, but he thought Ryder looked the tiniest bit smug where she hadn't before.

He encouraged her to rest, and she agreed more quickly than he'd expected. Kandros made his way down to the cargo bay intending to ask Vetra whether she had any snacks – she was there, as expected, in one of the back rooms. She sold him some jerky for fifty credits, which was extortion. "Only the Pathfinder gets freebies," she'd said, and Kandros merely tightened his mandibles to his face and paid up.

From there he was less sure what to do with himself, so he wandered the ship for a time, making small talk where appropriate with his own team and hers (except Drack, who he avoided). The tech lab, at least at first, was ideal. Jaal seemed to have taken up there, but he greeted Kandros warmly before returning to some deconstructed weapon on a nearby bench.

Kandros napped, seated on the floor and leaning against a crate. When he woke, it had been several hours – enough that he supposed they must be getting close to their destination. Jaal had moved to his bed and was poking something in his indecipherable omni-tool. Kandros decided to finally dig into his overpriced snack, and the sound of the wrapper caught the angara's attention.

Then, of course, because he couldn't possibly have any peace, Jaal decided to have a conversation. The worst kind. "How do you have sex?"

Kandros coughed and considered himself fortunate that he hadn't spat any jerky onto the opposite bulkhead, not least because it actually had a pleasant taste. "What?"

"I've been inside your cultural center, and I have listened to the stories there. Your computers supply the rest, but I wondered…" Jaal trailed off and took a breath. "Your anatomy is remarkably consistent. Do all Milky Way species have the same erogenous zones?"

"Jaal," Kandros said.

"Yes?"

He considered telling the angara that this was not a good conversation to be having, but it occurred to Kandros that the fastest way out might be to answer the question. So he simply said, "No," and he pointedly did not explain what hanar were.

"Hmm," Jaal replied. "Then," and of course he wouldn't be satisfied by just that answer, "how does one species know what to do with the other? Asari reproduce almost exclusively with other races, do they not? Is sexual attraction not a factor in their interest in the asari?"

Asking Kandros about cross-species liaisons hinted that Jaal knew – or suspected – more about Kandros specifically than he was letting on. So, naturally, the next reply was an attempt to deflect: "Are you interested in asari?"

"Their reproduction is fascinating," was Jaal's response, but he kept his attention on Kandros in anticipation of a reply to his previous query.

Kandros supposed it was too much to have expected to get out of it that easily, but he let his frustration get the better of him. "Porn," was his flippant response.

After that, "ah" was the only thing Jaal could think to say, and there was much-appreciated silence for a time. Then, after several minutes, "Is there a central repository for –"

Jaal's omni-tool chimed, and Kandros was immensely grateful that he never had to hear the end of that sentence. Ryder's voice came through, tinny from being translated to Jaal's language and then his in turn. "Jaal, suit up."

Kandros would have to remember to tell her how much he appreciated her timing.


	5. Truth

The navpoint led to a small base, merely three connected mining bubbles. It sat on a bare moon with no atmosphere and no surface indications of remnant or other architecture. Leneria and Jaal were the initial scout team by mutual agreement. Information on base layout and defenses was an absolute necessity. There was still no evidence either way on whether Recon 202 were hostages; they were definitely brought here, and their ship sat undamaged on the surface.

Since the next planning phase relied on intel, they waited for the scout team's return. One of the mining bubbles was successfully infiltrated under Leneria's stealth grid as the exiles processed supplies through the airlock, and it wasn't as simple as Kandros had hoped – a map retrieved and uploaded to the Tempest indicated a small web of artificial tunnels beneath the surface. A primary tunnel was visible, thicker than the others – a linear path at a thirty degree incline to something fourteen meters below – and that was where the map data ended.

Kandros tried to defer to Ryder for tactical decisions, but her point that he had more experience with larger ops was a valid one. There was a chance for reinforcements from the subterranean passage, and Kandros identified several opportunities to funnel outlaw forces in a way that would minimize casualties. He assigned each bubble a letter. There were three airlocks, and the primary tunnel emerged in C. Ryder would take her team to A and Kandros would lead his through B; they would do a quick sweep, then either retreat or meet at C to evaluate.

Ryder, after determining that Jaal was fine to return, added Cora Harper and instructed the rest of her team to stay with the ship. Drack grumbled about missing out on the fun, but ultimately he didn't object to or argue with Ryder's orders, and that was a scene Kandros would never forget.

The sweep went smoothly once they'd verified these exiles were hostile. Harper made a point of calling out every so often to make sure the second team was still alive – it was a good habit, and Kandros wondered whether her familiarity with a multi-pronged incursion was part of Ryder's reasoning in having her along. Jaal likely had that experience as well, but he might not be fullly aware of the common habits Milky Way races had picked up over the years.

When they met in C, there had been no sign of the 202 in either positive or negative capacity. Terminals were present in the pre-fab buildings but, according to Patel, showed indications of having messages regularly wiped, and there was nothing out of the ordinary besides a request for someone off-world to bring grilled adhi (and the mere suggestion that grilled adhi was something people ate made Kandros' stomach turn).

The tunnel was protected by an airlock, then a thick, sealed door. Ryder was able to bypass it without difficulty, and it slid open in silence. She ignored the side passages – Kandros instructed Patel and Hactis to clear them, just in case – and, that fourteen meters of vertical distance later, they stood in front of a kett airlock.

"Maybe it's something to do with the freighter?" was Harper's suggestion, and Kandros didn't disagree.

Once through, there were no hostiles in the two-level main room. The only light came from familiar technology: a handful of Initiative-sourced lamps strategically placed, with cables running down to a generator. There was atmosphere in here, but the lack of other sound made the generator louder than he would have ordinarily credited it for. Kandros' attention went to exits first – six hallways, three of which had doors. There were several kett terminals of some description, but none had power. The place was shut down entirely, then. Based on how utalitarian kett architecture was reported to be on average, he made some assumptions on the size of this facility – the amount of work required to dig this many hallways must have been particularly justified. Kandros nearly asked Ryder if she'd ever seen kett put this much effort into a building, but he expected that her answer would be 'exaltation'. After a quick confirmation with her, he led his team down the first hall on the lower level. Ryder took the opposite side.

"Remtech," she reported while he was still walking. "The outlaws have instruments down here. Looks like some of them were researchers."

"Botanists," he joked. Leneria looked at him sideways.

And he could hear the smile in Ryder's voice when she replied, "Exactly."

Harper did ask, "Why botanists?" but if Ryder explained, she didn't do so on the common frequency.

There were several smaller hallways branching out, and Kandros' team members explored them in turn. Each path, without exception, led to individual storage areas with some distinction between types of material – one held some kind of pouches similar to the angaran nutrient paste; another held scrap Milky Way tech. Entering the last room – almost a warehouse by its size – the lights came on, dimly.

It could be motion detectors for this section, Kandros reasoned. He opened comm. "Ryder, do you have lights?"

"Yeah," she replied. "Was that you?"

"Not us," Kandros said.

Hactis pulled his pistol, having cared very little without hostiles, and Kandros shared the sentiment. If neither team turned on the power, then it was likely they weren't alone. He turned his attention back to the room; there were large, unlabeled storage containers stacked neatly in rows. A quick look around the corner showed some changes in the pattern; the path toward the back wall wasn't likely to be straightforward. All the containers were sealed. Most looked as though they could hold a dozen cryo pods. Kandros glanced at the side – key pads, and he didn't know enough about kett technology to work one. "Patel," he said, and he pointed.

"We're down the last hallway on the first floor," Ryder said. "There are some kett on tables. Looks like it might be autopsies. SAM?"

And whatever SAM's reply, it must have only reached the Pathfinder team.

Kandros waited a polite amount of time, then said, "We have a lot of storage down here, but it looks like kett materials, not exile."

"Heading upstairs," Ryder replied.

Patel failed to open the crate, shaking his head and airing a complaint about passcodes. Kandros ordered his team to spread out, with Hactis manning the door just in case, Leneria making a round to the left, and Patel evaluating whether the crates might be stable enough to get high ground with jump jets. That idea did pan out, and Patel planted himself atop a stack at the center of the room. "Some kind of field at the back," he yelled down. "Round and orange."

That was ordinary for kett shield tech. "Use comm," Kandros reminded him. "How far?"

He did, the second time. "Closer to you. Ten meters? Left."

Kandros drew his rifle. Ten meters –

There was a small explosion in the direction of the entrance. Something fell, louder, closer – a metallic bang as something large clattered to the floor, then gunfire.

"Kett!" came Patel's voice, then a thwap and the sound of a body hitting hard.

Kandros was close enough to glance around the corner to head off being blindsided; there was a kett shield bubble there, but it was empty. It may have been an attempt to draw the team's entire attention, and if he'd kept his people close, it might have worked. When he turned back, he caught sight of a head between crates – kett head, he verified before firing, and he threw himself back around the corner for cover.

"You all right?" Ryder said through comm.

"Everyone alive?" Kandros echoed. Everyone except Leneria responded, but she could be cloaked and unwilling to compromise her position. He fired around the corner, and there was a garbled yell – his next peek showed blood, but he wasn't sure whether it had been a killing blow. "Fine for now."

"We're above you," Ryder said through comm. "They have cells up here, occupied. Four of them are identifying themselves as Recon Team 202, but there are three angara mixed in. They were all sent in to deal with the kett problem."

"By the exiles?"

"I guess they didn't consider themselves disposable."

Kandros advanced to where the kett had been; it laid dead on the floor. "There has to be more to it than –" Rapid gunfire hit his shields, and Kandros cursed before ducking back into cover. "Patel, you still up top?"

"Hell no."

So much for that advantage. Hactis' voice invaded the comm, "They pushed me back to the hallway. Some of the crates are open. Lot of kett, Kandros. If I throw too many grenades out here I might bring down the passage. Orders?"

Suddenly every crate was a danger. Leneria still hadn't reported in. "Get out," Kandros said. "All of you, get out. Go back to the main room. Funnel them through the hallway if you have to."

"I can get there," Patel said.

Then Ryder's voice again. "I can't bypass the cell locks."

And Harper, "The kett turned off life support in the cells. They're venting the air. If we don't get them out in the next few minutes –"

Kandros fired blindly around the corner and was rewarded with a shatter and a grunt as the kett's hard plating took a bullet or two – but it was too close, and he retreated further toward the back wall for a better angle. There was another one waiting for him there, but that one had no shields and was easily dealt with by burst of gunfire to the face, bullets tearing through softer flesh and brain matter in a way he didn't have time to watch.

"Patel took a bullet," Hactis said suddenly, "but he's fine. I can't hold the hallway, and Kandros is still in there."

"Jaal, go," Ryder ordered.

"I'm out of charges," came Leneria's voice, finally. Kandros breathed a sigh of relief. She continued, "But I got out. I counted seventeen on the way."

Kandros found himself keeping quiet about his current situation. He wasn't equipped for stealth. The larger kett was back behind him; he dispatched it by taking down what little of the shield had regenerated, then he flipped the switch for a charged shot and let fly. He lost his own shield briefly in that exchange, but it recovered after several seconds. He evaluated his chances: even if he could get past the kett still in the warehouse, there were those in the hallway to consider – if they were pushing Hactis back and got a shot in on Patel, Kandros didn't have much hope of getting through.

Peeking around the next corner – nothing – Kandros spared some time to consider the bigger picture. The kett base almost certainly came first, carved into the ground as it was. On a moon like this, it may have been one of the larger kett supply depots for the cluster. If the angara were fighting back in earnest at the time, it would have been benefical to hide. Then the angara taper off, and exiles find the facility – scientists, security. "The main passage," he said to anyone still listening. "The exiles funneled the kett up the main passage and had higher ground. That's how they kept them in check. They break in for research and see the same thing we did. It was empty, powered off. But there are still kett in here, and the exiles weren't equipped for more than that hallway." The exiles recruited the 202. A recon team with access to Nexus resources, including Pathfinder-provided weapons research – it fit. Kandros' hope for a better explanation prevented him from voicing the theory, but what kind of sense did it make to kidnap people, hand them guns, and shove them into a kett base?

The next corner led to a dead end, crates piled high on three sides. He could hear the kett beginning to talk to each other, gibberish echoing against the ceiling and his translator catching none of it. If he went up top, he'd be shot at immediately – they already knew his general location, he was sure, and it was only a matter of time before one of the kett came up with the idea to go up and look for him that way. He ducked back around and squeezed through a gap – as much as a turian could squeeze through anything – and he caught sight of another orange shield bubble. Oblong. Moving. If anyone in APEX didn't know what that was, they didn't last long.

"Hactis," he said. "Did you make it to the main room? You still have those grenades?"

"We're there. Jaal and I are holding it. Leneria has Patel." Hactis took a breath, "Yes, I still have grenades." The old bastard probably knew exactly where Kandros was going with this.

"Cave it in," Kandros said. "You'll lose some pressure, but we have an ascendant down here."

There was a pause. Hactis was just as military as Kandros, and he'd follow orders. Kandros prepared for an argument from everyone else. It was Ryder first: "Not with Kandros still down there."

"Did you get my team out of the cell block?" Kandros asked.

"Not yet, but –"

He reasoned that the height of the bubble meant the ascendant was up above, but it didn't yet have a good angle on him. Some of the APEX snipers had gotten damn good at taking those things down in two or three shots, but Kandros was an average sniper with an average rifle. Four or five for him, and he only had a three round clip. "I've run enough hopeless ops to know what it looks like. You have seven people up there who need evac. You can't do that if kett swarm the main room."

A spread of bullets hit his shields, as though from a shotgun. It wasn't quite enough to take them down, but the kett responsible faded back into visibility from having been cloaked, and Kandros had no real cover to speak of at the moment. It yelled what sounded like 'here' – his translator was finally picking something up this close to the source – and Kandros unloaded the rest of his assault rifle ammunition into its shields and chest. Ryder was saying something about coming to get him – he was too wired to pay any mind to her exact wording, but he knew his reply: "If you come here, those people are going to die. You're a Pathfinder." And that was all. Only after the kett fell did he realize his armor had taken several shots, and he felt blood somewhere on the right side of his face.

"Hactis," he prompted. Hactis didn't reply, but Kandros could hear gunfire through the open comm or echoing down the hallway or both.

Kandros slid down against the crates beside him and watched the orange bubble come properly into view. The kett faced him straight on from a distance of maybe five meters. He swapped to his sniper rifle, identifying the circular, revolving piece of tech responsible for the shield's integrity. His first shot missed as the kett jerked downward abruptly. The second did some minor damage, ultimately glancing off into the bubble. The third hit home and made the metal groan, but the shield didn't fall. He trialled his rifle one more time on the off chance, but it simply clicked.

Ryder would have survived this, he thought, and he almost felt guilty for doing so. He'd said it once in an entirely different context, but she really was something else. He wasn't sure how much of it was her own skill and how much of it was attributable to SAM's advice, but those parts together made her a force to be reckoned with. And he hoped, as he watched the orb slide into place and pulse, that she would recover quickly from this. He doubted she took death easily – on the contrary, she was more the type to be burned by it. He took some sick measure of comfort in the idea of her grieving his death. There was no point in feeling sorry about that now. "Ryder," he said into the comm. "You know I love you. I should have said so."

Bright particles gathered from the edges inward. Kandros tensed, despite himself.

The orb shattered, pieces caving in from the right side only to be expelled on the left, and the bubble protecting the ascendant flickered abruptly out of existence. Its head snapped to the left, seeking the source of the interruption – Kandros assumed that, behind its eyes somewhere, it was beginning the process of rebuilding its equipment. There was another shot, loud enough that he wondered how in hell he'd missed the sound of the first one, and every muscle in the ascendant's body went slack. It hovered only for an extra heartbeat, drifting upward with its jaw loose and its mouth open. Then the tech gave way, and its body collapsed in a heap on the floor.

Kandros could only hear his own breathing. He tried to think who – he knew, somewhere in his chest, but he wanted something to make him believe it could be anyone else, anyone who wouldn't have had to make the sacrifice. Ryder should be helping the captives.

When she came into his field of view with Hactis right behind, he knew. He knew they'd made a terrible mistake getting this invested. It was only in the rush of not being dead that Kandros could think 'Tann was right' – they couldn't make these decisions objectively. Despite his rebellious phase throwing him to the next galaxy over, he was turian to the bone, and even he couldn't think straight around her. Ryder, human and barely-trained, inherited the sentimentality of her father that had spared her life; she stood less of a chance than he did.

Somewhere between his thoughts, Harper confirmed the deaths of the 202 and angaran prisoners.

Kandros was acutely aware that this wasn't a mistake that could be corrected. Cutting things off might have worked when Tann first involved himself, but they were well past that now. Ryder had carved a hole for herself in his heart and earned it, and even if she went off and mated some human and had little human babies, Tiran Kandros would still be biased in his decisions regarding the human Pathfinder. If she went around and fucked every person on the Nexus who she could get to agree – and Kandros didn't believe there would be any shortage – he would still be biased toward her. She could betray them and blow the whole Initiative to pieces and, while he would be hurt beyond belief, he would still be biased toward her. So, when Ryder took a moment now to evaluate his injuries before yanking him to his feet, when she dragged him out of there with the rest and grieved the 202 instead of grieving him, Kandros said nothing at all. Her actions proved she'd fallen into the same trap. On the Tempest, he clung to her not in relief, but in anticipation of the consequences.


	6. Recovery

'After' never came. He felt as though he'd been rubbed raw by the experience, or sobered, so he stayed in the med-bay where Ryder left him even after being told he was fine. He'd been second to receive a once-over; Patel was dozing on one of the beds. Kandros watched the others cycle in and out – Hactis wouldn't look at him, probably for having disobeyed, and Kandros couldn't find the energy to reconcile. Cora Harper made small talk (despite having watched several people die of decompression less than an hour prior, he couldn't forget). Jaal asked if declarations of love were always so dramatic, and Kandros actually laughed at that. Leneria came next, and she clearly blamed herself for the whole mess. Kandros reassured that her inability to stealth grid his way out of a glut of kett was in no way her fault.

Then Ryder returned, after they were underway. Dr. T'Perro started on a clearly oft-repeated tirade about deconstructing that rifle to replace the bio-converter, and Ryder declined in a manner that sounded equally well-used. Then she looked at him, opened her mouth as though to speak, closed it, and left.

What was there to say, really, when you've let seven people die in exchange for one? He'd already run through every excuse he could think of, anything that wasn't driven by their mutual feelings, and the only plausible one involved his value as a leader. Kandros wouldn't downplay his importance to the Nexus, but seven… he wasn't sure how he felt about seven. He didn't even know what number he'd see as objectively ridiculous. Should he be saved at the expense of twelve lives? Thirty? Three hundred? There truly wasn't anything quite like death to make someone question his own worth.

He wasn't angry with her. He loved her. A Pathfinder made a living of impossible choices, which is why she had a hand in things like type of installation for Prodromos or the fate of one almost-murderer. Ryder had made dozens of these decisions. Krogan scouts or Pathfinder Raeka and a few salarians? Hand over a remnant drive core or keep it? This was just another to add to a growing list. Perhaps she'd gotten used to them.

Kandros had Sajax cover him for one more day after the report was filed. He figured that would be long enough for Tann to read it and get properly upset. He didn't include his theories about the 202, mostly because they were unsubstantiated and in part because they were dead. As likely as it was that Tann would care less about the fate of new defectors – people they would have simply gifted a one-way trip and a wave – it simply wasn't the right thing to do. It would distress any family they still had in cryo more than their deaths alone. Separately, having found nothing on the exiles being held at Prodromos (other than circumstance and association), Kandros recommended their release.

Then, with a bottle of turian brandy and no glass, he sat in the middle of his sofa, flipping through vid options. He felt as though he hadn't done this in a lifetime – or 600 years of lifetimes. He nearly selected a Blasto parody, but his omni-tool beeped, and he couldn't find it in himself to ignore it.

> Pathfinder Ryder: How are you?

It was a hundred questions in one, phrasing carefully selected to be non-specific. He waffled on asking her whether she had time to come by, to be here, but he ended up rejecting the idea for fear of succumbing to desperation. In the end, his reply to her was similarly careful and non-specific.

> Tiran Kandros: Holding up.

She sent nothing else, and he understood.

Tann requested to see him in the early evening. Kesh and Addison were excluded from that invitation, and one-on-one meetings usually meant Tann was really set to go off. Kandros was thankful he hadn't imbibed more than a third of the brandy; it left him pleasantly warm but not impaired.

Instead of a lecture or incoherence – either of which Kandros was well-conditioned to brace for – Tann simply looked exhausted. A chair had been dragged out from somewhere and set up on the wrong side of the director's desk, and Tann sat slouched in it before straightening at Kandros' approach. "Kandros," he greeted mildly.

Frankly, this was the most terrifying reaction he could possibly have seen. It was extraordinarily un-Tann, several orders of magnitude too casual.

Tann only shook his head, as though he might have read the shock on Kandros' face. "It was Ryder's decision. You're here in an advisory capacity." He paused politely for a reaction, but Kandros found himself with nothing to say. Tann nodded, his gaze flicking across items on his own shelves. "The angara were identified. Their families were notified, or so I hear. Their ambassador is…" he trailed off momentarily, searching for the right word, "displeased, to say the least. I have a meeting scheduled in the morning."

Kandros rubbed his brow with the fingertips of one hand and arranged himself by the window. Feeling guilt when looking at Tann was a bizarrely foreign feeling. "You were right," he admitted. "About me and Ryder."

A little of the Tann he was used to emerged then: true to form, the salarian took it as an ego boost. "Of course I was right. None of you care to listen." From his tone, Kandros almost expected the phrase 'petulant children', but Tann didn't use it. "As much as it pains me to admit it, you are currently irreplaceable. Your Lieutenant Sajax has been turbulent at best. Ryder, well. Based on her medical reports, the transfer of SAM would almost certainly kill her."

Something twisted horribly in Kandros' stomach. "What?"

Tann waved it off. "Suffice to say that Ryder cannot be replaced as human Pathfinder, her achievements notwithstanding."

"SAM isn't supposed to be that invasive."

His comment and general focus went ignored. "I need to determine what assurances we can offer the angara," Tann said. "This can't happen again."

Of course it was politics. Kandros felt his mandibles widen but didn't laugh in Tann's face, barely. Tann wasn't wrong, but he couldn't just drop things like that into conversation and expect Kandros to… well, maybe he could. This was Tann, after all.

Kandros dropped the thought for now and considered the dilemma. The obvious starting point was a blanket ban on joint ops with himself and Ryder – a hard rule, no exceptions, and hopefully it wouldn't cause more problems than it solved. Then... distance, perhaps. Ryder was rarely on the Nexus, and Kandros briefly considered suggesting he be relieved of duty while she was around, but longer-term that might in practice violate Tann's requirement that Kandros keep his position. Delegate, instead? Two militia members – maybe selected by Tann, because he'd enjoy that – who could take on any work involving Ryder or her team.

He proposed both of those ideas, and Tann nodded. "I appreciate your thoughts on the matter. Thank you." And after a second's thought, "That's all. You may go."

Kandros ignored the subtle annoyance which bubbled up at being dismissed that way. Kesh would have called him out on it; Kandros didn't have the energy. Tann was left alone in his office with no further discussion.

Sleep didn't come easily, and it wasn't restful. Kandros woke early and arrived at the militia office at 03:00. He began sifting through Sajax's reports as the occasional officer filtered in or went off shift. Ryder jogged at 04:00, and he set his datapad down to watch her openly.

If the experience had granted him anything, it was a budding ability to not give a damn about the repercussions of watching his – well, there wasn't any sense in 'girlfriend' without her assent – watching Ryder make her usual laps around Ops. It was something he'd only peeked at in the past, part politeness and part professionalism. Now, he kept an eye on her whenever she was within view: labored breathing from exercise, the part of her lips, the lines of her jaw and waist – and the memories he could summon for how each of those features felt beneath his own mouth or hands. A 'you've done well to be dating that' gurgled up unbidden from some part of himself he didn't recognize, and he chuckled to himself a bit at the thought. She'd been just another human when they met. One with rank, but human nonetheless.

He managed to work off and on until 05:00, when she finished up and approached him. She kissed his mandible – a single, soft press of lips, nothing lewd – and that told him she was also well past giving a damn. He hummed happily under the simple affection. "Good morning," he said.

"I'm worried," was her non sequitur. "I have to see Tann in an hour."

"Is that before or after he talks to the angaran ambassador?"

Ryder flinched slightly, showing mostly in a twitch around her cheeks. "I didn't hear about that."

Kandros put his right palm to the outside of her shoulder and touched his forehead lightly to the top of hers. Watt coughed somewhere off to Kandros' left, but he ignored it. "You'll be fine," he said quietly.

She took a moment to let her contentment melt into a smile, just a heartbeat before replying. "I need a shower," she said, and she slipped away from him with the greatest care.

"Ryder." Kandros stopped her with just her name, and he lowered his voice to the point that even Watt wouldn't hear anything to make fun of. "I love you. I meant that."

Ryder only kissed him for it, but he wasn't worried enough to read into her lack of words. If she intended to break things off, she would have done so already; it was more likely that she simply wasn't ready to say it. He'd mostly acclimated to human habits on those sorts of things.

He saw her again an hour later, briefly, as she headed for Tann's office. Nels had arrived by then, planted behind the desk and consolidating recon reports into APEX briefings – Kandros was saying something to the sergeant when he paused mid-sentence to watch Ryder stride by.

"Good work, yeah?" Watt said to Kandros from the side, his mouth half-full of some generic human breakfast bar. He coughed down his next bite. "What just walked past, that is. Happy is good on you, boss."

Kandros sighed. A little of it was posturing; he appreciated the idea that he looked happy with Ryder. "Go do something productive, Watt."

"Don't diss a compliment. Not like I'm telling you your girl is hot, is it?"

It was worth screwing with him at this point. "Is she?"

Watt inhaled some part of his food and was distressed for enough seconds that Kandros actually considered helping. He hacked up whatever it was into his mouth, then swallowed properly. "Sorry?"

Kandros found his gaze lingering in the direction Ryder had gone. She wouldn't be back quickly if Tann had his usual long-windedness, but he was looking forward to seeing her whenever that happened to be. It gave him a moment to come up with a reply, and he corrected his attention by turning it to Watt. "If turians had pin-up calendars, Ryder wouldn't exactly be one of the models."

"Any half-blind mutt sees how you look at her. And you want the opinion of some human tosser?"

Nels chimed in with a mutter, "This sounds like a trip to Personnel waiting to happen."

Watt waved the comment off. "Not chatting about anyone badly, are we? Just the merits of the boss' girlfriend."

"Not my girlfriend," Kandros said.

"Physical merits," Nels began, "which is more suitable chatter for off-duty hours, if at all –"

"That," Watt ignored Nels, addressed Kandros, and pointed in the direction of Tann's office. "isn't your girlfriend? You having a laugh?" His gaze flicked behind Kandros for a moment, and he dropped his arm abruptly.

"Am I interrupting?" came Jaal's distinctive voice.

Kandros turned to see Ryder's angaran crewman propped up against the wall, clearly having had some moments to get comfortable. "I hope you are," Kandros replied under his breath. Maybe it would get Watt off his back for five minutes. "What can I do for you?"

"I would like for you to accompany me for a visit to your Director Tann."

That prompted Kandros to check the time; it was still barely 06:15. "He's meeting with Ryder."

"I know," Jaal said. "That is why it is imperative that I speak with him."

Watt handed Kandros a datapad; he took it absentmindedly and paid it no attention as yet. "I won't stop you."

Jaal inhaled loudly. "I would like Ryder to have full representation. I have a point to make to the head of my people's delegation." It hadn't occurred to Kandros that the ambassador would already be there – he didn't pay much mind to passersby and still had moderate difficulty telling angara apart – but the ambassador's concurrent involvement made Ryder's meeting more concerning than not.

It definitely wasn't strong justification for Kandros' presence, but curiosity was a powerful motivator. Kandros glanced down at the datapad from Watt, expecting to have to delegate work – instead, he was met with the definition of 'girlfriend' in twenty-one different human languages. He smacked the pad down a little too strongly on the counter in front of Nels. "I'll be right back. Get Watt to do some real work in the meantime."

As he accompanied Jaal to Tann's office, Kandros tried not to wonder whether he'd regret it.

"That's completely reasonable," was audible from above – Tann's voice – as they walked in. "We have suffered the loss of more than one Pathfinder, and I regret to say that we have been too lax training the replacements –"

"You've said that several times," the angaran ambassador countered exasperatedly. "Are the lives of three angara worth only platitudes to you?"

The ambassador came into view first – Isa de Navar, if Kandros recalled correctly, but for the most part people got away with simply calling him 'ambassador'. He saw Ryder second, facing the angara with her shoulder pressed into Tann's window. Despite the circumstances, Kandros found every other emotion completely overpowered by affection for her – but that, after all, was why they were here.

Tann was standing stiffly behind his desk and had just opened his mouth to say something else, but he caught sight of Jaal, and then Kandros, before he could. "Kandros," he said with a barely-detectable undertone of confusion, "it's best if Ryder's team remain outside."

"He insisted," Kandros offered as a completely ineffectual counterpoint.

The angaran ambassador didn't seem offended by the intrusion. "Jaal," he greeted cordially. "You wouldn't have come without reason."

Kandros walked through to prop himself up by the window beside Ryder. She slid her weight from her shoulder to her upper back, smiled at him, and returned her attention to the new vein of discussion.

"I assume you're asking reparations?" Jaal pried.

"I can't deny that our own resources are stretched thin, Jaal. Even so, it's more important to put the families at peace, or this alliance will fail for mistrust. Ryder has more exposure to our people than most. She agrees."

"And if I said that I approved of Ryder's decision as she made it?"

The ambassador was taken aback, clearly not expecting that sort of complication - Kandros couldn't read the ambassador's expressions, but his silence spoke volumes. A glance at Ryder, and she seemed nearly as shocked at the turn this had taken; her jaw was loose and her eyes searched her team member's posture. Perhaps she was trying to detect a lie somewhere in his behavior.

Jaal continued, "As much as it pains me to lose more of our people, it was the correct choice. Ryder had already attempted to release the prisoners. If she had not turned back, we would still have three bodies, Isa. These people, our allies, would have five, rather than four." He motioned to Kandros.

The ambassador's focus shifted to Kandros in its entirety. His face was still unreadable, moreso than even Tann's; his mouth turned down briefly, but whether a frown meant the same thing to them, who knew.

The sigh Tann let out was clear enough. He addressed the ambassador, "I think it's best if we continue this discussion privately."

There was consensus on that point. Ryder was the first one out of the room, with Kandros and Jaal not far behind. The second she passed through the door to Ops, she threw her arms around Jaal and said her thanks. Jaal dismissed it as the truth, spared Kandros a nod, and left the pair of them standing together. Kandros pressed his mouth to her cheek before stepping in the direction of the militia office. Ryder stopped him, correcting the affection to a meeting of mouths with one hand on either side of his face.

"I don't think I did anything impressive enough to deserve that," he said.

"You don't need 'impressive' for one of those," she replied.

"What would 'impressive' get?"

She traced the edge of his mandible with one of her thumbs, her attention so focused there that, for a moment, he wondered whether she would answer at all. "I'll have to think of something." Ryder withdrew and gave him a nudge. "Get back to work."

Despite saying that, she accompanied him, which made getting back to work a little more relaxed than it should have been. She set herself to clearing the APEX queue. He hesitated to say it was on his behalf – it seemed more for herself, something to set her mind to. Watt seemed properly chastised by Nels, so Kandros didn't double down. When the first APEX drop came, he grabbed space at a terminal, opened comm, and propped himself up on his hands. His personally-attended ops had been disastrous as of late, but he was still damn capable of running his teams.

No one died that day.

_Recon 202 Incident_  
_To: Tiran Kandros_  
_From: Jarun Tann, Director of the Andromeda Initiative_

_Kandros,_

_The interruption to the meeting this morning seems to have given the angaran delegation new perspective. The ambassador and I have agreed that the loss of life was a tragedy, but also that Ryder's decision was not incorrect. Nevertheless, the Nexus will be redirecting several resource shipments to Aya as a gesture of sympathy. It will put us in a difficult position for some time, but the idea seems to have calmed the situation as much as I had hoped._

_Pathfinder Ryder will be grounded for several days as we establish more strict oversight for her behavior. One member of your recon team had a brother at Prodromos. Ryder will write and deliver a formal apology. We will discuss which members of the security team are most suited to handling the Pathfinder at a later date._

_Please keep the tactile aspects of your relationship out of Operations. I have heard several complaints from Personnel._

_Director Tann_


	7. Together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Smut sold separately; see Part 3.

Tann's eventual solution was, in Kandros' opinion, ineffectual at best: he found someone to read reports from the Tempest as they were transmitted by SAM. Kandros wasn't going to bring it up – Ryder probably appreciated how minimalist the oversight was. What was effective (or so Kandros hoped) was Tann following Kandros' suggestion to bar direct professional interaction. He'd gone further than Kandros intended, insisting that Kandros recuse himself from department-head discussions relating to the human Pathfinder, but even that wasn't unlivable. Ryder was worth that price and more.

She requested from Tann that she spend her time grounded at Prodromos, and it was permitted with no complaint that Kandros had heard. Ryder extended her leave at Eos to two weeks even after being officially free to fly – Kandros didn't ask her reason. He harbored some suspicion that it had to do with guilt, at least in part – but, having seen enough death for several lifetimes, he wondered whether her presence wouldn't hurt the scout's brother more than it helped.

During previous separations, they hadn't spoken; Kandros wouldn't let that turn into habit. They traded emails every few days. Some were affectionate, others informational, and he asked about SAM. Knowing that they couldn't be safely separated put her career in a different light: there would never be an easy, relaxing retirement to a colony, not as long as humans still needed a light to follow. Kandros was surprised at how all right he was with that sort of ending.

The Nexus was mostly business as usual for the duration of her absence, but people were getting bolder in their curiosity as time went by. One human woman asked whether he'd be all right fathering human children when the time came. A young, uninformed asari asked whether Ryder's Pathfinder status had any bearing on his continued relationship with her. The worst came in Vortex, one and a half weeks after Ryder's departure.

"Isn't it a step toward pyjacks?" asked a drunk, elderly turian as Kandros paid off an APEX tab, and Kandros naively didn't understand the meaning at first. "Fucking humans," the old man had said.

Even then, Kandros misinterpreted. "We left Shanxi six hundred years back," he'd replied.

"Spirits know I don't give two damns about Shanxi," the other turian spat. "It's about your descent into beastiality. Fat in a bag of thin skin – mangy-looking fur." He breathed and drank a shot. "It's my right to ask questions. The young ones fall in line because of your rank, but there's no Hierarchy here, and I don't work for you."

A glance up at Dutch, who was currently using the advantage of five fingers while applying the finishing touches to someone's drink, showed his jaw set firmly and his eyes averted. If the nearest human was going to give the bastard latitude… There were a thousand comebacks, but Kandros simply finished his task and left without replying.

That night, before succumbing to sleep, Kandros sent Ryder a message asking to revisit their second date. It served secondarily as Kandros reaffirming his position – Ryder was worth not only the professional price, but also every social consequence, and he'd carry on with her as he had been.

When the Tempest docked, two weeks and one day after he'd last seen her, it was two hours after his shift ended. Kandros had cleaned up and changed out of his habitual armor, and he was waiting for her as they'd arranged. If her crew did anything against policy, it was Nels' turn to set them straight.

Unfortunately, waiting in that hallway was almost a reverse walk of shame – she was very nearly the last person off, and he had to stand through every one of them.

Dr. T'Perro came first, doing no more than smiling politely.

Drack ignored him.

Vetra smacked him on the shoulder and said, "Remember, don't be an ass." Kandros chuckled at that.

Peebee – who he'd met exactly twice before – stopped in her tracks to consider him. "So," she said, "you're the one Ryder's shacking up with." And, after Kandros insisted that there was currently no 'shacking up', she said, "Better hurry up with that or someone else is gonna get his foot in the door."

Cora Harper tapped Peebee in the shoulder with her palm to keep her walking, greeted Kandros briefly by name, and continued on.

Liam Kosta stopped for small talk, joined momentarily by Jaal. They discussed the steadily-improving infrastructure at Prodromos, cultural difficulties between the Milky Way and angaran staff, and APEX deployments on Eos. Liam mentioned that a pregnant friend of their engineer had made a zealous attempt to talk every human present into parenthood – Ryder not excluded – and Liam had apparently taken great joy in watching Ryder try to tactfully explain that a 'natural conception' candidate was not in the cards. Jaal didn't seem to understand why it was funny, and Liam couldn't find the words to explain. Liam moved Jaal along when Ryder exited the ship, and Kandros silently thanked him for his foresight.

Relative privacy allowed Kandros to embrace her without hesitation, sliding his thumb along her jaw before dropping both his hands to her waist, and Ryder tugged his face down for a emphatic meeting of mouths. His second kiss, lingering, was just for good measure.

She broke away and nuzzled unprompted into his mandible. "I got the baby talk," she said.

Kandros chuckled. "Liam mentioned." He slid his hands up her sides, then back down to her hips. It was compulsion to memorize the soft curve of it.

Ryder continued, "She left me alone last time, but now she's weirdly enthusiastic about it. When I mentioned you, she emailed me a database of sperm donor profiles."

"Sounds like you need to be shooting fewer kett before you can get on that." He was sure she'd have elbowed him if their position had been conducive to it, but he wasn't ready to discuss the subject of children in any serious sense. "Come with me," he said instead.

Ryder folded her five fingers somehow in his three, and Kandros led her up to hydroponics. He maneuvered them to stand in the same spot she once had, where he hadn't been able to touch her or clearly voice his thoughts. Some human fruit had grown in, front and center: tiny red spheres against green leaves.

"Tann can fuck off," he said resolutely.

At his side, Ryder broke out laughing. He turned toward her and waited for her to straighten before drawing the fingertips of his empty hand against that side of her face.

"I," and words managed to fail him entirely for a second as he traded that for setting his palm against her cheekbone. He tried again. "I wasn't ashamed." Though it was all he could get out, it was laced in his mind with 'I'm still not ashamed to be standing here with you' and 'you're beautiful' and 'I love you'.

Ryder seemed to get the idea, because she trapped his hand there with hers. "Tiran," she said, and that did everything it always had when it came from her. His peripheral vision told him they'd attracted some people-watchers, so when she opened her mouth to say what he suspected it was time for, he silenced her with a squeeze of her hand and drew her away.

"I don't mind an audience," he told her. "I do mind when they're paying close attention."

She tugged at his fingers suddenly, changing course for one of the side hallways. Safely through the door, Ryder broke their hands apart to put him against the wall – which was still a uniquely attractive experience – and she kissed him again. Her tongue snuck past her lips, but when he made an attempt to point out the security camera, she took his open mouth as an invitation. He groaned – tongues were going from flat weird to strangely pleasant with her – but he had to purposefully break away. "I missed you," he said, "but if we don't move on, we're giving posterity a really good show."

Ryder ran her fingers down his abdomen, pulling sideways for lines against his hips – barely a centimeter above risky territory.

Kandros immediately revised his objection to a breathy, "Shit." And then, "The general merchant probably has some decent booze."

"Are you trying to get out of this?" she asked playfully, a smile teasing her lips.

"I'm trying to coax you back to my apartment before I get arrested for public indecency. Tann's been pretty permissive. I don't want to give him an aneurysm."

"That's a new one."

"Public indecency? Unfortunately, no. Not wanting to shoot Tann?" He chuckled. "Yeah, I'll give you that."

Ryder's grin was not very well suppressed. Her right hand slid to his back. "I think I want to hear that story."

It took him a second to realize what she meant and the ways in which what he said might have been misinterpreted. "Trust me, you don't," he said. He leaned back in to touch his mouth to her cheek, then the place at her neck where a medic might take a human pulse. She inhaled sharply as he ghosted over the latter. "I wasn't the one being arrested."

"Camera," she said, as though he'd forgotten.

"Drinks," he replied, stubbornly refusing to leave that spot on her skin. "Would be nice to have a date last longer than twenty minutes."

Ryder's fingertips dug lightly into the more flexible skin low on his waist. "It stops being a date when I go home with you?"

He tried, experimentally, opening his mouth and slowly closing it against her skin. He took great care not to pinch for how fragile she felt. Ryder rewarded him with a gasp, and Kandros moved one hand to the small of her back. He lifted back up to rest his forehead against hers. "When you come home with me, it's more."

She closed her eyes as he watched, and he listened to her breathe. His omni-tool chimed rudely. He ignored it.

"Tiran," she said. A pause, and then, "Don't interrupt this time."

Kandros' mandibles widened in a grin. "Sure."

"I love you."

His next exhale discharged any lingering stress he'd harbored these past few months. "That's good to hear."

Ryder borrowed one of her hands from being wrapped around him so she could shove him half-assedly in the chest. Kandros laughed, but his interaction with the other turian was reemerging in the back of his mind.

"I'm not giving up on this," he assured gently.

"What's wrong?"

Kandros wasn't going to lie to her about this, not even by omission. "A turian accused me of heading down the path toward beastiality. Gutsy bastard, saying that to head of security, but I left him alone. Wouldn't look good if I started a fight."

Silence and the knit of her brow told him only that she couldn't decide whether to comfort him or be upset on her own behalf. Kandros extricated himself from her, pressing his mouth to her forehead as he did so, and he led the way back to the main thoroughfare.

"Where are we going?" she asked, trailing behind only barely.

"Compromising," he said.

Ryder grabbed him by the hand and stopped him, pulling him to the railing and out of the way of foot traffic. "I've never been more attracted to someone," she said.

Kandros cupped her face with his right hand, running his thumb over the corner of her mouth. After glancing around conspiratorially, he leaned toward her ear. "Don't worry," he said. "I'm still closer to public indecency than not."

She laughed, and he reveled in the smile that lit her features. And he knew, with absolute certainty, that they would be all right together.

There were no more comments as he spent a chunk of his pay on wine they could share, and she held it while he keyed entry into his apartment. Of course, the compromise didn't pan out – their date ended prematurely when she tossed the unopened bottle to the couch and led him to bed.


End file.
